Welcome to the Wellness Research Team homepage! The Wellness Team aspires to foster human well-being by enhancing understanding of resilience, stress-coping, and happiness. The team has in recent years:

• Ascertained the role of meaning, positive affect, positive and negative thoughts, and self-efficacy in shaping life satisfaction and psychological well-being
• Tested how meaning in life leads to happiness
• Found a new and potentially better way to measure generalized self-efficacy
• Discovered factors that aid psychological growth after trauma
• Shown how purpose in life and reasons for living help reduce risk of suicide
• Determined forms of coping that reduce pain-related distress
• Found mechanisms—such as beliefs and types of thinking—through which personality may affect well-being, as well as potential ways to reduce the harmful effects of personality traits such as neuroticism.
• Discovered malleable cognitive factors that predict declines in neuroticism and trait negative affect, even over short time periods.
• Explored cross-cultural differences in meaning in life.

The team, which meets every week, has collected data on a half-dozen additional projects and is now crafting studies to help assess or develop people’s self-efficacy, meaning in life, self-esteem, and happiness. Please join us for an exciting endeavor that aims to engage, intrigue, and expand awareness as it aids human welfare. Drop us a line anytime for more information at olightsy@memphis.edu or (901) 678-4169. Happiness to you!

Below is a link to a TV appearance on PBS station WKNO in which Dr. Lightsey discussed recent findings about happiness and aging. 

http://video.wkno.org/video/2317089966